Last week, the Mattel Toy Corporation announced a line of “EcoWarrior Barbies” made with biodegradable material and patterned after famous environmentalists. The company also pledged to stop using plastic entirely by 2030. “We have made more than a billion plastic Barbies, and enough is enough,” said Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Mattel, in a statement. “With our plastic-free commitment, we denounce the empty promises of plastic recycling and take a bold step towards real ecological sustainability.”
As part of the plastic-free initiative, actress Daryl Hannah showed off the new dolls in a videos, touting their new Barbies dolls made of “Nettle Denim,” “Mycelium hide,” and “Protein fiber.”
A few lowbrow media sources—People Magazine, The Washington Times—picked up the story, posting the web equivalent of below-the-fold stories about the toys, but it didn’t seem to spark much interest.
Everything written above is fake
Maybe because it was all fake. There are no “EcoWarrior Barbies,” and Mattel didn’t announce it was going plastic-free by 2030—at least, they didn’t announce it recently (more below). The whole thing is the invention of the “Barbie Liberation Organization,” an environmental group trying to trick the media into talking about plastic.
Even the angry corporate response from Mattel’s lawyers, where Michael Pellegrino, Senior Director & Assistant General Counsel, Mattel supposedly said “Mattel is the victim of a hoax perpetrated by trolls toying with the emotions of Barbie fans everywhere… We will expose them and bring the full force of the law against these bullies. Mattel is all about fun, and this is not fun,” is fake, perhaps a try at taking a second bite of an apple that never existed.
How to fool none of the people none of the time
I enjoy a good hoax, but this was a terrible hoax. Even though it was carefully crafted, with spoof websites and the cooperation of a celebrity spokesperson, it just didn’t work. The hoax didn’t manage to catch any of the hype around Barbie nor fool anyone besides People magazine (who have since deleted their story). Even Mattel didn’t care, telling CBS News that it had “nothing to do with Mattel” in an email. So what went wrong?
Barbie Liberation Organization’s hoax went up like damp firewood because it’s basic and uninteresting, but even more importantly, it failed because Mattel is already doing everything this group is trying to shame them into doing. The company pledged to achieve 100% recyclability by 2030 four years ago, and this August released Barbie Eco-Leadership Team—four Barbies made from recycled plastic who care about environmental causes. There’s nothing here to protest.
The people who got it wrong this week is the protest group, who didn’t seem to do basic research on the subject of their protest. I’m sure Mattel is doing something evil, so why not start there?
If you want to shame a corporation effectively, you have to pick something that they don’t do, but should do, and that everyone wants them to do. You don’t even need fake websites and celebrities either. All it took was a single tweet from a fake Eli Lilly account this winter that read “We are excited to announce insulin is free now” to drop Eli Lilly’s stock price by 4.37%, focus worldwide attention on the cost of insulin, and make Eli Lilly stop advertising on Twitter.
More importantly, Eli Lilly decided to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 per month for people with private insurance soon after the uproar over the tweet. Eli Lilly was probably planning this move anyway, but I like to believe it was the tweet.
